


Uninevitable

by thesometimeswarrior



Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Episode: s02e08-09 The Ultimate Enemy, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Suicidal Thoughts, badger cereal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-23
Updated: 2016-02-23
Packaged: 2018-05-22 18:56:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6090808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesometimeswarrior/pseuds/thesometimeswarrior
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"That won’t happen, Daniel! I promise you. I won’t let it happen. I won’t remove your human half. Even if you beg me to. And it’ll hurt. I know, it already does. But you won’t have to hurt alone. We will get through this. Together.” </p><p>Vlad Masters takes the boy in after the explosion at the Nasty Burger, tries to help him heal. He has plenty of demons of his own--of grief and guilt and mourning--with which to grapple, however. </p><p>AU in which Clockwork doesn't stop the explosion at the end of the Ultimate Enemy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Uninevitable

He sees him for the first time _after_ at the funeral. The boy is hunched, it seems, trying to make himself small. He is a husk; all the spirit, all the optimism in the boy's eyes, everything for which the man had once mocked him, is gone. The child has been a ghost for almost a year, but he has never looked dead, thinks Vlad, until now. 

He approaches him slowly, tentatively. “Daniel.”

The boy looks up, expressionless. “Plasmius.” There is no spite or venom in his voice; it’s a statement in monotone, a mere acknowledgement of Vlad’s presence.

“I am so, so _sorry_ ,” the man says. And he means it. He has never wanted this. Yes, Daniel has been his rival. Yes, they have fought, laid traps for each other. But he has never desired serious harm to come to the boy, not really, and not to his friends or his sister, and certainly not to Maddie. Admittedly, he has plotted to have revenge on Jack, but wonders—has wondered for quite some time now—that if the opportunity ever had presented itself, whether he would have been able to follow through. After all it was a burning envy, and not true hatred, that he felt for Jack, Jack—who had Maddie, who had a family, and love, and a life that was fulfilled. Because Vlad has known the pain of having no one, of having the people whom you have loved ripped from you by a cruel accident of fate, of losing and being alone. But at least when that had come to pass for him, he was a young man in his early twenties. Daniel, on the other hand, is a mere child of fourteen, so suddenly so utterly alone.

The boy says nothing.

“What will you do now?” asks Vlad.

“I—I don’t know,” responds Daniel. “I can’t stay here, though. This whole stinking town is a graveyard.”

“Come stay with me.” The words are out of his mouth before Vlad knows that he’s thinking them.

“No!” shouts the child, suddenly animated. “No! I can’t!”

“Listen, Daniel,” he says softly. He understands the boy’s trepidation, understands why he is hesitant to suddenly trust a man he has been fighting for the greater part of a year. But he has to make him comprehend how serious he is, how genuine his intent, how much he can help. “I know what our history has—”

“This has nothing to do with that!” Daniel shouts quickly, in a rush of words that he seems desperate to expel all at once. “I—I saw the future, what happens if I go to your house after this: I’m in so much pain—and _I am in that pain now_ —that I ask you to remove my human half with your Ghost Gauntlets so I don’t have to feel any of it, and you do—and God, Plasmius, I want that so much—but my ghost half takes the Gauntlets and removes your ghost half and fuses with it and becomes the most evil ghost who has ever been, and _I PROMISED THEM I WOULD NEVER TURN INTO THAT!_ Don’t you see? If I come home with you it’ll happen! I’ll turn into him! And I’ll break the last promise I made to…It’s inevitable.” 

Vlad breathes for a moment, absorbing this information. Finally, when he is sure he has parsed it out in his mind, he responds gently but firmly. “It’s not. It’s not inevitable. Dear boy!” he kneels down and pulls Daniel, who is now sobbing and shaking, into a tight embrace. “That won’t happen, Daniel! I promise you. I won’t let it happen. I won’t remove your human half. Even if you beg me to. And it’ll hurt. I know, it already does. But you won’t have to hurt alone. We will get through this. Together.” 

The man does not move from the embrace as the boy’s body becomes racked with increasingly furious sobs. Finally after several minutes, Daniel seems slightly calmer. He pulls out of the embrace, and nods slightly. “Okay,” says the boy quietly, feeling, Vlad presumes, that he really has no one else, nowhere else to go. “Okay, I’ll come with you.”

* * *

He doesn’t eat the meals that Vlad brings him (always Vlad and never any of the servants. Not yet. Maybe not ever), and he doesn’t sleep, Vlad knows because he has found him wandering the mansion at the odd hours of the night, and the man can’t remember the last time he has seen the child in his human form. 

“You need to eat, Daniel,” Vlad says one afternoon, as he sets a platter with a cheese sandwich and tea on the table in the boy’s bedroom. 

“Why,” states the phantom hovering above him in monotone. “Ghosts don’t need food.”

“But you are not a ghost.” 

And suddenly Vlad is dodging an ectoplasm beam. “Oh really? Not a ghost? I didn’t know humans could shoot those.”

“Daniel,” Vlad sighs. “When was the last time you were in your human form?”

The Ghost Boy shrugs. “Dunno.”

“You cannot stay like this. You are _human_.”

Daniel looks at him, lands, but does not change from his phantom self. His expression does change though, and Vlad watches as his defenses drop. Suddenly the child is _honest_. “It doesn’t hurt as much when I’m a ghost.”

“I know, my boy.” 

“Then I don’t see why you’re asking me to change back.” 

“Because you are human and—”

“I don’t _want_ to be human!”

“But you are. And the feelings mean that they are still with you, Daniel. That you love them. You need—”

“Love shouldn’t _ache_ like this!”

Vlad exhales, looks at his shoes. No, love shouldn’t ache like this. Love should be embraces and smiles and laughs and even sometimes tears, but love should not be a black hole in one’s chest, should not be an explosion behind the retinas, should not be burns on the skin. He changes the subject. “Your human half needs food. And your human half and your ghost half are linked. If you don’t eat, you will die.”

“Maybe I don’t care!”

Vlad is taken aback, momentarily knocked silent. When his voice returns, he responds softly, “But I do, Daniel. I do.”

The young ghost furrows his brow and gazes at Vlad with a changed expression, questioningly, expectantly, but says nothing. 

“Listen,” says the man slowly, tentatively. “Can we come to an agreement? We both agree not to use our abilities indefinitely, not to 'go ghost,' as you would say. I won’t if you won’t. You can hold me accountable to that.”

Vlad almost regrets these words as soon as he has said them. He has taken to changing into his ghost form at night, as soon as his employees leave, when he has gone as long as he possibly can without feeling a need to sob. But, he has told himself, he doesn’t deserve to cry. Not he, who was horrid to the family, who has spent twenty years wishing something like what transpired would happened to Jack Fenton. No, he is not allowed to cry about it now. He is guilty guilty guilty; he cannot cry. And as Plasmius, he doesn’t need to. Being a ghost gives him release—or at least allows him to ignore the lump in his throat, the salt water that he holds in. It’s enough. And every morning it’s painful to heave himself back into human form, to let all of the feeling come sailing back. But he has been able to do it so long as he has known he can escape at the end of each day. He can barely conceive of relinquishing this one respite. 

But he can just, and he will, if that’s what he must do for the boy. He owes the child that much.

Though he may not grasp the full extent of Vlad’s motivations, and though they have never discussed it, Daniel knows that Vlad, too, has been using his ghost half as a coping mechanism, because in the wee hours, the boy has come to lab to see Plasmius floating aimlessly, vacantly. 

“Really?” the boy asks, finally. “You’re willing to do that?”

“I am,” says Vlad.

Daniel considers for a moment, and then sighs as he reverts to his human form. No sooner do the rings fade than the boy’s legs buckle and he collapses.

The man just manages to catch him before he crashes into the floor.

* * *

It has been several weeks since Vlad has been his ghost self, and he feels his grief and his guilt and Plasmius all bubbling under the surface of his skin simultaneously. At night, unless Daniel seeks him out—which he does occasionally but not often—he clenches himself into a ball on his bed. It is all he can do to keep from sobbing. Which he can’t, he can’t, he won’t. So he doesn’t.

Tonight, however, the child does come, so Vlad unfurls himself and sits up to greet him.

“My boy,” he says faintly. “How are—“ 

Vlad cuts himself off when he sees the Ghost Gauntlets gleaming in the child’s hands. “Daniel.”

“Please, Vlad.”

“No. I made you a promise, and I intend to keep it.”

“I know, but I really can’t do this anymore.”

“No.”

“Please! I’m begging you!”

“What about the promise that you made to your friends and to your family? Does that no longer mean anything to you?”

“NO!” Daniel is shaking. “MY FAMILY AND MY FRIENDS ARE DEAD! _EVERYONE_ IS DEAD! WHAT DO MY PROMISES TO THEM MATTER ANYMORE?”

“What about what you’ll become? As long as you can feel this pain, you are not him and you won’t—“

“I DON’T CARE ABOUT NOT BEING HIM!” he roared. “Let him come! I won’t feel it.”

“This isn’t you, Daniel.”

“Then I died in the Nasty Burger explosion too.”

“Daniel—”

“If you won’t help me, then I’ll—I’ll figure out how to do it myself!” He turns to leave, and Vlad is desperate.

“Wait.” he watches as the boy turns back toward him, Ghost Gauntlets exposed. “I’m sorry, Daniel.” 

Then, quickly, before the boy can react, Vlad blasts the Gauntlets with two ectoplasm beams until they shatter in Daniel’s hands.

The boy looks in horror at the useless remains. As he realizes that his last hope for relief is dashed, he unleashes a wail full of anguish and pain, a ghostly wail such as Vlad has never heard before, unwittingly transforming into his phantom self in the process. 

Vlad is pushed back several feet by the sonic waves, feels the noise reverberate in his skin, as though it will explode his eardrums. He covers his ears with his hands, then, transforming into Plasmius, creates a force field around himself to muffle the noise. 

“Daniel,” he mutters to himself. He has to get to the child in pain. He desperately pushes his force field against the sonic wave, grunting with effort. “I’m coming.” He struggles against the force of the wail, unsure if he has the strength to get to its epicenter, but, finally, he reaches the child. Ignoring the screaming of his eardrums, he lowers his force field, and then, against all of his instincts, wraps the still-wailing Daniel in an embrace.

“I’m so sorry, Daniel.” As Vlad says it, he feels himself start to shake, and he is certain it is not only from the boy’s wail. “I am so sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Daniel.” This time, Vlad cannot fight the sobs that come—resisting the wail has robbed him of the strength—nor does he fight the tears that stream from his eyes. “I’m so so sorry.” He is freely weeping now, and hardly notices as the child ceases his ghostly wail, as the boy begins to return his embrace. Then, suddenly they are both sobbing, both grieving together on the floor of Vlad’s bedroom, connected to each other. 

Vlad is not sure how long they stay there, but when he realizes that he has stopped crying, he finds that both he and the boy have transformed back into their human selves, and the pressure of that building guilt and grief in his chest is gone. He isn’t okay. Neither is the boy. But as he embraces and is embraced by Daniel, he thinks that eventually they will be. They will get through this. Together.

**Author's Note:**

> That was an emotional experience to write. Hope you enjoyed! Please consider leaving a review!


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